Dance Company Lasta, Naraku, The Coronet, September 18, 2025
A scene from Naraku by Yoshimitsu Kushida (photo: Hiroyasu Daido)
Naraku, the title of choreographer Yoshimitsu Kushida’s work for Dance Company Lasta, translates in the program as ‘abyss’, but it is also the Japanese word for ‘hell’. If you add to these meanings Kushida’s program note that ‘reality and fantasy are like two mirrors, reflecting each other and easily transcending the boundaries between them’ along with a description in the freesheet of his choreography as ‘erotic, beautiful and grotesque’, the influence of the Marquis de Sade comes to mind. What transpires on The Coronet stage is indeed infused with Sadeian proclivities — especially in Kushida’s treatment of women — but there are elements of the production that risk being lost in translation.
Under plush red lighting, we see the stage transformed into a Victorian study furnished with a bare desk, a glass-fronted cabinet, two chairs and an Eastern carpet — all of which could well have come from the wonderfully eclectic collection of furniture in the theatre itself. Facing us, sitting at the desk, is a man (Kushida) whose stillness is more than inaction; his presence has entered into the realm of codified Japanese Noh theatre where stillness is not simply the absence of movement but a repository of spiritual and emotional influence. He is evidently fixated by what is going on in his head, and what is going on in his head wields control over the elements of the stage. For most of the performance, until there is the beginning of a resolution, this Sadeian figure remains almost perfectly still apart from some small gestures in stark contrast to the contemporary dance movement Kushida employs for his male characters on the stage. From a Western perspective, it is easier to watch movement and engage in its possible narratives than to engage with stillness and its possible significance.
The lighting (by Kushida with Ros Chase) separates episodes of the narrative with blackouts. After the opening image of Kushida at his desk, we see the figure of a half naked Satoshi Nakagawa lying on the front of the stage as if he has been spat out by some giant imagination. He has; it turns out he is the alter ego of Kushida himself, and the other figures — Miwa Motojima, Yumika Yasuoka, Mana Tazaki and Riku Ogawa — are emanations of Kushida’s mental and spiritual turmoil. Only Aoi Okamoto appears to have direct access to Kushida, acting as his conscience, tidying up his books and rousing him to action.
Satoshi Nakagawa and Riku Ogawa in Naraku (photo: Hiroyasu Daido)
What follows, underpinned by Motoi Matsuda’s dark score, are fantasy episodes involving three women in turn: Motojima, Yasuoka and Tazaki. In a repeated pattern of predatory sexual play between these women and Nakagawa leading to mounting violence and death, Ogawa acts as a moral brake as if Kushida is aware of the excess of his fantasies but is powerless to stop. Ogawa has an exquisite movement quality that is powerful yet deeply spiritual; he curves through space leaving a trail behind him. He is the perfect foil to Nakagawa who cuts through space with a precise muscularity. Their relationship as expressed in their respective physical qualities reflects the fluid boundaries between fantasy and reality and reveals what Roland Barthes would have termed ‘erotic’, the fleeting image that gives pleasure. One might expect that pleasure to extend to the relationship between the men and the three women, but Kushida’s transformation of these women from victims into balletic spirits appears all too familiar to the point of caricature. Motojima and Yasuoka are classically trained, but choreographing this rather fey version of classical dance — especially in their duet — next to the dynamics of Nakagawa and Ogawa jars the imagination and removes the element of fantasy and the erotic where it is conceptually and physically needed. If Kushida’s translation of Noh within a contemporary dance context requires a double take (or a second viewing), his translation of female victims into contemporary wilis is a choreographic form of mixed metaphor. Tazaki’s movement quality is more in tune with the embodiment of a tortured psyche.
Okamoto, whose blood-curdling declamations prove the physical antidote to Kushida’s reverie, eventually brings about a possible resolution. Kushida is stirred into joining the two men, all three stripping down to their waists to grapple with one another. A final image of an exhausted group of men and women around one of the chairs with Kushida in a dominant position appears to banish fantasy in favour of reality. But right after the blackout a spotlight reveals that the figure of Nakagawa has taken his place. It’s a brilliant sleight of hand that returns Naraku to where it started, in the abyss of a Sadeian imagination.
How to be a Dancer in Seventy-Two Thousand Easy Lessons is the kind of performance that comes about when the complexity of choreographer and director Michael Keegan-Dolan’s productions for Teaċ Daṁsa is reduced to an autobiography with a cast of two. The story-telling, the lyricism, the messy, prop-filled stage, the Irish passion and the passion for Ireland are all still there in full measure but the story-telling is essentially turned inwards to the story-teller himself. Not only is Keegan-Dolan talking about himself but he is on stage in the spotlight, directed by his long-time collaborators, co-performer Rachel Poirier and lighting designer Adam Silverman.
Keegan-Dolan has no difficulty with telling stories. He has a gift for it, and when the subject is his own life he has no shortage of tales to tell, beginning with a fable about an egg that ends with the admonition, ‘Don’t look back, don’t look back’. But this is exactly what Keegan-Dolan does for most of the next 80 minutes in episodes that start inside his mother’s womb and trace his development as a dancer and choreographer in what the freesheet describes as ‘a story of innocence and experience, sexuality and shame, humiliation and defiance, identity and nationality, endings and ancestry’. I’m not sure where the figure of seventy-two thousand came from, and the lessons he recalls are never easy, but together the title gives an idea of the depth and breadth of Keegan-Dolan’s brimming imagination that goes into creating his works and the lessons learned from a life lived fully in the theatre. The stage setting — a cross between a workshop and a gym conceived by Hyemi Shin — is an illustration of carefully designed anarchy from which his work takes shape.
But where is the space for the other member of this cast? If you were only to listen to the show, you would hear Keegan-Dolan’s stories that coherently link the beginning and the end. In between you would hear Poirier’s voice sometimes singing, sometimes barking, and sometimes reciting poetry; she doesn’t tell stories so much as illustrate and direct them. But if Keegan-Dolan is the contents of the show we see on the stage of Sadler’s Wells East, Poirier is the binding that holds it all together. Where Keegan-Dolan guides the audience with his verbal imagination, Poirier guides with her lyricism. She moves from theatrical realism — her muscular entrance in working clothes and safety goggles brandishing a metal cutter to open the theatre box of props — to lyrical improvisation in her heroic and intensely musical interpretation of Ravel’s Bolero.
But however effective their respective roles may be and how Keegan-Dolan and Poirier clearly complement each other as performers, How to be a Dancer in Seventy-Two Thousand Easy Lessons is a series of anecdotes wrapped in sketches stitched together with two engaging artistic threads that are not woven tightly enough to hold the framework together. Keegan-Dolan is central to his own narrative while Poirier joins somewhere along the way. And even once she has arrived she still runs parallel to Keegan-Dolan’s flowing autobiographical episodes. Only when she dances the Bolero does the narrative come to a halt because there is nowhere for it to accompany her, and this creates an artificial hiatus in the production. Such is the direction and force of Keegan-Dolan’s monologue that when Poirier has finished dancing the Bolero it’s as if he asks : ’Where was I?’ before continuing his narrative. Tellingly, the applause is brief at the end of the solo; it should have been greeted with much greater enthusiasm because it’s a beautiful interpretation, but the narrative context of the show overshadows it. For me it’s where the integrity of the seventy-two thousand lessons is compromised. The show is engaging, it’s fun, it’s beautifully performed, but the whole is less than the sum of its parts.
Russell Maliphant Dance Company, Maliphantworks4 at The Coronet, September 11, 2025
Russell Maliphant in In A Landscape (photo: Dana Fouras)
As the title of this evening suggests, this is the fourth in a series of performances by Russell Maliphant Dance Company at The Coronet, and there is a mysterious yet palpable relationship between Maliphant’s style of choreography and the architectural atmosphere or inner world of the theatre. The stage is small but suspended to the level of what was once the theatre’s Circle (the parterre has become the raked bar downstairs), giving an other-worldly intimacy to the space. It’s ideal for Maliphant’s program that comprises two solos, created 16 years apart, that form, in terms of dance time, a reflection on his creative development. The program starts with Maliphant’s latest work, In A Landscape, which premiered in the same theatre in February, and reaches back, in AfterLight, to an early, fully-formed crucible of Maliphant’s choreographic style; every aspect of In A Landscape has its seed in AfterLight. Seeing the two works in the reverse order of creation is to take the long way round to the beginning.
In a Landscape (a homophone for Inner Landscape?) is a collaboration with visual artist Panagiotis Tomaras, a break from the long-time partnership between Maliphant and lighting designer Michael Hulls. While it is not always clear in a long-term partnership the extent of one influence over another, it is refreshing to see Maliphant, dressed simply in chic overalls by Stevie Stewart, stepping into a new landscape of light and shadow, one in which he inhabits the character of a seasoned wanderer in search of enlightenment. The voluminous, cream-coloured material hanging in parabolas at the back of the stage — the one suggestion of colour in this landscape — gives a spatial sense of Greek simplicity and order and a metaphysical sense of fate. Tomaras creates in light and shadow the image of a man shaping his destiny, first in a series of still poses interspersed with blackouts — like a table of contents — and then merging these poses in the swirling, spiralling patterns Maliphant makes with the material. Is he emerging from the womb or returning to it? Is he young or is he old? Time is fluid in this landscape as Maliphant journeys neither forwards nor backwards, neither freely nor fully constrained by the screens Tomaras drops down in front of him on which his movements are projected. There is an Eastern flavour to the electronic score from Maliphant’s long-term partner and muse, Dana Fouras, who seems to will Maliphant forward with her music through the maze of light and shadow until he merges quietly back into the engulfing darkness. We are not aware if he has found what he was looking for, but only of the journey taken.
Daniel Proietto in AfterLight (photo: Hugo Glendinning)
AfterLight begins where In A Landscape ends, in the deep shadows of light. This work from 2009 is an inspired collaboration between Maliphant and Michael Hulls with the equally inspired dancing of Daniel Proietto. Its origin is in the circular drawings of Vaslav Nijinsky that he drew during a mental breakdown following the First World War. For Nijinsky the circular motion links the spiral musculature of the dancing body with what he saw as the perfect symbol of life and art. These two elements of the physical and the spiritual pervade Maliphant’s choreography and Proietto’s performance. He begins in the dark, turning imperceptibly against the direction of the revolving particles of light projected overhead (video projection by Jan Urbanowski), setting up a breathtaking spiral movement not only in his body but in the space of the theatre itself. His red-capped head and torso are visible but his feet are in darkness so his revolving body and blade-like arms give the illusion of a slow and uniform figure planted on a turntable. Proietto’s costume is a subtle reminder of Nijinsky’s portrayal of the tragic doll, Petrouchka, and Hulls’ lighting in the first section seems to set up the scene of the doll trapped inside the solitude of his cell. Set to Erik Satie’s Gnossiennes 1-4 for solo piano, mystical dances that have no set time signature in a recording by Dustin Gledhill, Maliphant’s choreography and Hulls’ lighting bring to the score a visual reality that Proietto further enhances with his limpid breadth and grace. I saw him dance this in 2010 and have never forgotten its impact. This performance lacked nothing of the original, nor was its impact in any way diminished. That speaks to what can happen between artistic collaboration and performance at the highest level.
English National Ballet, The Forsythe Programme, Sadler’s Wells, April 10, 2025
The program image of the company in William Forsythe’s Playlist (EP) (photo: Laurent Liotardo)
When the curtain opens on the Sadler’s Wells stage at the beginning of English National Ballet’s The Forsythe Programme, it is the figure of Sangeun Lee in Rearray (London Edition 2025), standing sideways to the audience under Tanja Rühl’s luminous, even lighting that captures all the potential energy of the space. Our focus is drawn naturally into Lee’s apparent stillness, anticipating the release of that energy in the lines and angles that her body holds poised within it. In silence, the sinewy machinery of her limbs extends into the space around her and her weight alights on the ground as if dancing a sophisticated dialogue with gravity. There is seemingly no effort, no evident resistance in her movement, even if the entire technique of classical ballet on which it is built is predicated on the natural opposition of the body’s internal forces. Lee’s mastery of stillness and precision means we are free to enjoy the angular, extended choreography Forsythe has created for her; the dancer and the dance have merged seamlessly. This is not always the case, however, with her two partners on this occasion: Henry Dowden and Rentaro Nakaaki. They dance the steps and shapes of the choreography but we also see the physical effort that goes into making them. Roslyn Sulcas, writing in the evening’s program, highlights ’…the idea of ‘line’, which transforms the body into a continuously flowing, harmoniously coordinated whole, with even the most strenuous passages appearing to be effortless.’ When the effort becomes external and visible, however, it has the effect of an overload of electricity that blows the fuse. The choreography doesn’t actually stop, but the dynamics are short-circuited and the lines and angles of the body foreshortened.
Forsythe’s choreography, like that of one of his formative influences, George Balanchine, is built on the kind of technique — and Balanchine trained his dancers to master the technique he demanded — that extrudes the vocabulary of classical ballet through a vivid, geometric imagination that is invested in the joy of movement. There is little else in Rearray(London Edition 2025) to divert our attention — no narrative, no scenery, and minimal costumes. Forsythe sets up a frictionless choreographic system to negotiate David Morrow’s score, and it is then up to the dancers to perform within it without touching the sides. When danced well it is pure exhilaration to watch but not if there’s the slightest friction in the system.
Rearray (London Edition 2025) is followed by a re-staging by Stefanie Arndt and Noah Gelber of Herman Schmerman (Quintet) to a score by Tom Willems. It’s another work in which the men in particular — some of the leading dancers in the company — are doing too much, their shoulders belying any attempt to create a clean line. And with one chance to see it (it will return in ENB’s R:Evolution in October) we have only the program note to assure us that Herman Schmerman (Quintet) ‘is arguably the second smash hit of [Forsythe’s] career, following 1987’s In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated…’
Even in the program photograph of the final work of the evening —Playlist (EP) — the evidence of shoulder strain is clearly on display. What is going on? Why allow damning evidence to appear on a full-page spread in the program? The work has its origins as Playlist(Track 1, 2) from 2018, when Forsythe was invited by former artistic director Tamara Rojo to create it on twelve male dancers in the company. It was extended the following year as Playlist (EP) at Boston Ballet and entered English National Ballet’s repertoire in 2022. Set to ‘an irresistible soundtrack of infectious pop and soul’, it is Forsythe in a major key channeling the company’s dance-floor energy in a series of choreographic permutations that, unlike the first two works, look out at the audience with an irrepressible desire to please. It seems the Sadler’s Wells audience knows what to expect, for the enthusiasm generated by the rising curtain, like the anticipation of the headliner at a rock concert, continues to the end of the performance.
English National Ballet’s new artistic director, Aaron Watkin, is still at the stage of assessing his heritage. With The Forsythe Programme he is able to draw from his own experience as a dancer working with Forsythe to enrich the repertoire, but if, in his own words, he wants to continue ‘to show the different colours of Bill’s choreographic voice’ there’s work to be done on refining the company’s vocal chords.
Noé Soulier, Close Up, Linbury Theatre, March 20, 2025
A still image from Noé Soulier’s Close Up (photo: Delphine Perrin)
The single page information sheet for Noé Soulier’s Close Up, issued at the Linbury Theatre as part of Van Cleef & Arpels’ Dance Reflections Festival, states that ‘this creation continues [Soulier’s] exploration of the relationship between dance and live music, already present in Faits et gestes (2016), The Waves (2018) and First Memory (2022). This work also extends his research with live video and the relationship between the camera and the dancers explored in his movie Fragments (2022).’ This might inspire you to search for these works on YouTube but it’s already too late if you are someone seeing Close Up for the first time without knowing about Soulier’s related explorations. As historical information it naturally looks back, while a live performance is very much in the present; Close Up says what it says without any explanation or historical preamble.
You would think that exploring the relationship between dance and live music is what any choreographer with access to live music would want to explore, but it is not always the case, even in the main Opera House next door, where live music can sometimes exist in a parallel universe to the choreography. But Soulier is both musical and choreographically adept, and he is aided in Close Up by the Ensemble Il Convito directed from the harpsichord by Maude Gratton, playing extracts from JS Bach’s Art of Fugue (Contrapunctus 1, 2, 3, 9, 11 and 14) and the Andante from his Sonata for solo violin no. 2 on period instruments.
You don’t choose this level of musical invention played by a top class ensemble unless you are ready to bring to it a corresponding level of choreographic integrity. Soulier treats the Art of Fugue with a sense of playful invention of his own in which he brings his choreography to meet the music. They play sometimes together and sometimes alone; Soulier pays his respects to the music and the musicians by having them play two of the fugues without the dancers on stage, and to the dance and the dancers by having them perform without the music. In the former, we hear the music in its natural state, and in the latter we see the music in its transposed state, as if Soulier had choreographed the movements to the score but for these passages simply withheld the music. When they are all together, the music is embodied equally in the dancers and the musicians.
His six dancers — Julie Charbonnier, Nangaline Gomis, Yumiko Funaya, Samuel Planas, Mélisande Tonolo and Gal Zusmanovich — are all inspired in this joyous exploration of the music which they allow to flow through their youth and enthusiasm in a rhythmic gestural vocabulary that has a decidedly contemporary feel. They also contributed their own improvisational ideas to the choreography. Dressed casually in jeans and t-shirts, the dancers enter and leave the stage like fugal themes, building the complexity of patterns and steps in a constantly morphing series of accumulations and subtractions. The assured smoothness of their gestures, as in the use of the out-breath to emphasise a throwing movement of the arms or the action of kicking a ball into the auditorium, are fused into Bach’s musical invention with delightful freshness.
‘Close up’ refers to the photographic term for a shortening of perspective to bring a subject closer to the lens, and while serving as a metaphor for the exploratory path between live music and choreography, it also manifests in the ongoing scenography (by Soulier, Kelig Le Bars and Pierre Martin Oriol, with additional assistance from Nicolas Bazoge on lighting). At one point the dancers leave the stage as the musicians continue playing. The back curtain draws aside to open up the depth of the stage and reveals a giant screen hovering above a black rectangular structure that resembles the outlines of a camera; in the centre is a frame that suggests a viewfinder with a video camera (the eye) placed in the centre of the frame facing upstage. The choreographic exploration continues but even though we can see the dancers entering and exiting as before, the screen shows only what appears within the frame, in close-up. We see the dancers’ bodies from the thigh to the chest, like Greek statues that have lost their limbs. The video and lighting are beautifully achieved; at times I feel I’m watching a stylish ad for jeans.
For the final section of Close Up, the dancers fold up the white backdrop, slide the frame off and leave the stage while the musicians continue to play. Is Soulier giving the music the final word? No. The dancers return for an exuberant recapitulation of the choreographic score that, in giving equal value to music and dance, is simply joyous.
Trajal Harrell / Zürich Dance Ensemble, The Köln Concert, Sadler’s Wells East, April 4
Trajal Harrell and Zürich Dance Ensemble in The Köln Concert (photo: Reto-Schmid)
The challenge Trajal Harrell faces (and he seems to have taken it up) in using Keith Jarrett’s iconic 1975 Köln concert as a choreographic score is that the entire late-night concert was improvised, and although Jarrett later authorised a piano transcription, it’s impossible to re-capture the free-flowing atmosphere of that late-night concert in any form. As music critic Corinna Da Fonseca-Wollheim wrote, “without the live, improvised element, the magic is lost. Unlike a piece of classical music, “The Köln Concert” is a masterpiece only in its recorded format. And it requires an audience that participates in the unfolding act of creation each time anew.’
Presented at Sadler’s Wells East, Harrell’s TheKöln Concert, created on himself and six dancers from his Zurich Dance Ensemble, perhaps started off life in the studio as an improvised exploration of part of Jarrett’s concert (Harrell uses only the first 26-minute movement, or Part 1, of the album) but it has since become, like the recording, fixed. One advantage Harrell and his dancers have is that any live performance inevitably embodies some element of improvisation within the choreographer’s more or less defined lines.
The very opening of Köln Concert begins with Harrell standing in bare feet on the edge of the stage watching the audience take their seats; he is wearing a white shirt and black pants but he has a dress tied casually behind his neck and hanging down his front like an apron. If we have never seen Mr. Harrell before, we may be wondering if this person should be there at all, but he remains in place, enjoying watching as well as being watched. In conversation with Philip Bither of the Walker Arts Centre, Harrell says he does this a lot in his performances, that he enjoys communing with the audience in this way ‘and I don’t need to be hidden before the show.’
The stage (conceived by Harrell) under Sylvain Rausa’s even lighting is stark, with seven low, grey benches spread out in a parallel pattern on the front half of the stage and a speaker mounted on a stand behind, signifying recorded music. But when the music begins, it’s not Jarrett’s Köln Concert but Joni Mitchell singing My Old Man from her album Blue. Harrell begins to float his arms loosely to a gentle lilt of his feet that has the feel of a private, trance-like improvisation in the public arena. Perhaps Joni is the dress and Jarrett is the black pants and white shirt. Another song follows from the same album; the piano of The Last Time I Saw Richard is reminiscent of passages in Jarrett’s Köln Concert, and while it’s playing Ondrej Vidlar wanders on stage to sit on a bench and begin his own variation of Harrell’s floating arms. Rob Fordeyn, Songhay Toldon, New Kyd, Thibault Lac and Maria Ferreira Silva each enter in turn to sit on their respective benches with variations on the floating, percolating arms as Joni sings It’s Comin’ on Christmas and Both Sides Now. It’s a long prologue that blends the idiosyncrasy of the dancers in their colourful, quirky costumes (by Harrell) with the homogeneity of the gestural choreographic language. By the end of Both Sides Now all the dancers have left except the tall, imposing figure of Lac, who taxies upstage to prepare for takeoff.
The Köln Concert was conceived at a time Harrell was studying Butoh, and in the same way Jarrett plays those first distinctive notes of his concert (inspired apparently by the Köln Opera House intermission bell), Harrell sets the tone of his choreography with a Butoh-inflected fashion runway as Lac minces unsteadily downstage looking steadily at the audience. The other dancers follow in a suite of languorously intoxicated variations while re-arranging and swapping items of clothing on each appearance; as much is happening in the wings as on the stage. What comes across is an improvisation on individuality with its accumulation of dishevelled, raunchy imagery. The sometimes over-eagerness of the dancers to embody it can lead to affectation, but when New Kyd launches into her variation the smooth exhilaration of her movement approaches the heights of Jarrett’s inspired playing. In the closing of Part 1, Jarrett plays a rousing section over an ostinato bass that Harrell interprets as a round dance where each of the dancers, when they arrive at the front, improvises a short solo before joining the circle again. It’s a heady climax that resolves into a beautifully modulated conclusion where Jarrett and the dancers finish their ‘unfolding act of creation’.
It is always going to be challenging to see a performance by an artist with the degree of mastery of Saburo Teshigawara and to find it doesn’t fit any easy classification. In the case of the UK première of Waltz, presented with impeccable programming at the Coronet, the music is familiar — with a strong romantic Russian flavour — but the choreographic use of gesture derives from the consciousness of an artist whole cultural and philosophical sensibility gives the waltz an unfamiliar context. If you play the thirteen waltzes Teshigawara has chosen for Waltz one after the other there is, after the blustering opener of Johann Strauss’s Frühlingstimmen Walzer, a decidedly melancholic feeling. Teshigawara clearly feels drawn into this kind of brooding contemplation. The succession of waltz sequences gives the work the feel of frames in a choreographic film, from tightly wrought close-ups to expansive track shots. The music itself also suggests a cinematic treatment; alongside waltzes by Eugen Doga and Peter Gundry, even those of Chopin and Tchaikovsky sound as if they have been written for the cinema. With two people on stage performing solos and duets, there are inevitably intimations of a narrative, snapshots of memory and experience. The waltz thus becomes a metaphor for life, one that has a regular rhythm and infinite melodies. In its social form the waltz is a partnership, and Teshigawara dances with his long-term partner, Rihoko Sato, but Waltz is an opportunity to use the familiar rhythm to channel more than the male-female relationship: through their contrasting but deeply complementary movement styles, what comes across is the relationship between melancholy and exuberance. Teshigawara, dressed in black, seems often introspective, a Hamlet figure afflicted with existentialist thoughts that take him ever closer to the edge of darkness. At one point he stamps his feet and bangs his fists against the wall like a petulant prince reacting to some nightmarish vision; it is as if he is trying to erase the rhythm of the waltz rather than reinforce it.
Following the music’s melodic line with his rapid changes of direction and his filigree arm and hand movements, Teshigawara is in contrast to Sato, dressed in white, who digs deep into the pulsing rhythms of the waltz for her whirlwind of life-giving affirmation. Despite the intimacy of their relationship, Teshigawara and Sato don’t ever touch; the significance of events portrayed exists within the beautifully calibrated space between them, with Teshigawara’s use of light suggesting physical and psychological boundaries. Musicologist Michel Schneider said of the voice that it is a gateway towards the unconscious (‘La voix est une porte vers l’inconscient’). With Teshigawara it could be said that the gateway towards the unconscious lies in his use of gesture. His limbs, precisely articulated around a dynamic core, carry the emotion of his dance far more than his face, which he wears like a mask, giving him the uncanny quality of a puppet with an extraordinarily expressive body. This in turn heightens the inexorable sense of fate hanging over Waltz. It is Sato’s autonomous, fluid presence, a headstrong muse swirling around Teshigawara with her long, thick white hair that completes but never finishes her movements, that seems to will him to life and, when she collapses, to nearly lose hers in the process. She elicits the ecstasy of the waltz to Teshigawara’s often tortuous indecision. It is significant that while Teshigawara opens Waltz, it is Sato who finishes it alone on stage in the dying of the light.
It is the kind of performance, like The Idiot from 2019, that keeps a tenacious grip of the imagination and won’t let go. While the program does not specify who choreographed Waltz (I wasn’t able to attend the post-show talk to find out), it seems likely, given their unique styles of movement, that both Teshigawara and Sato had a hand in its creation and are jointly responsible for the remarkable synergy between them on stage. Sato is named ‘Artistic Collaborator’ but Teshigawara is listed as responsible for ‘direction, lighting design and costume’. It is perhaps his way of concentrating the creative vision as sharply as possible, but when the director is also performer he cannot see what the audience sees. There were two moments in the production that may have suffered because of this: an indeterminate hiatus towards the end of the performance — do we applaud or don’t we? — and the ending itself, which detracted from Sato’s richly deserved place alone on stage.
There’s a curious blurring of perspective in Léa Tirabasso’s latest work, In The Bushes, commissioned by South East Dance and The Place, co-produced by Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg, and presented at The Place for two nights. Whatever is happening in the bushes, we can’t quite see what it is; the frame of reference keeps changing. We know there are six dancers — Catarina Barbosa, Georges Maikel Pires Monteiro, Karl Fagerlund Brekke, Laura Lorenzi, Mayowa Ogunaikke and Stefania Pinato — but from Monteiro’s very first entrance in his remnants of cross-period costume it is clear some transformation has taken place; his outer features are incontrovertibly human, and he is laughing, albeit hysterically, but his gait and gestures seem driven by another state of consciousness. The rest of the cast appears similarly afflicted. Afflicted? Among themselves the performers converse and act with knowing familiarity and, to our evolutionary pudeur, a disarming lack of self-consciousness. When Lorenzi takes off her clothes and wipes herself down before continuing on her trajectory she is seemingly unaware of our gaze. Throughout In The Bushes, Tirabasso plays with our gaze and that of her performers, to sometimes jarring and uncomfortable effect, but there is always a healthy dose of self-deprecatory wit to compensate.
In the post-show talk Sarah Blanc aptly suggested that In The Bushes is a kind of Masque, not, as originally conceived, a festive courtly entertainment but a festive entertainment nonetheless, with the audience as sovereign. At first I felt as if I was looking through Ben Moon’s crystal clear lighting at an unequivocally chaotic presentation of the six dancers — dressed for the occasion in Jennifer Lopes Santos’s whimsical, colourful costumes — unified in their feral desire to reveal their behavioural eccentricities. Unlike story ballets that require a minimum of explantation, In The Bushes left me reaching in the dark for the program notes or, as on this occasion, waiting for clarification in the post-show talk.
What we learn is that In The Bushes is built out of an interpretation of evolutionary theory, specifically by British paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, Henry Gee, in his book The Accidental Species. One of the evolutionary concepts Gee rejects is that humans are fundamentally superior to other species — the notion of ‘human exceptionalism’. Tirabasso’s choreographic take on this is for her dancers to embody a movement vocabulary of insects or animals as a way of subverting this exceptionalism. At the same time — which is where the blurring of perspective comes into the choreographic equation — she questions our assumptions about the animal world relative to our ability to create, to think, to express and to function as a society.
This is not the first time Tirabasso has developed such an idiosyncratic language; her two previous works, The Ephemeral Life of an OctopusandStarving Dingoeswere developed with the help of Gabrielle Moleta, an animal transformation coach. Moleta does not appear in the credits for In The Bushes which suggests Tirabasso is taking what she and her dancers have already learned from Moleta in a new direction. In these previous works, animal movement was part of an allegorical framework; here, Tirabasso injects it into the bloodstream where it takes control of the choreographic framework. This requires of each of the dancers a Kafka-esque state of mind to allow them to inhabit another species without relinquishing their human form. It is the psychological tension in this dichotomy — and the brilliant achievement of the dancers in embodying it — that makes In The Bushes so arresting.
Dance is not the best medium for intellectual argument; to grasp Gee’s evolutionary theories it is probably better to read The Accidental Species than to watch In The Bushes. But Tirabasso’s evident stimulation by Gee’s thesis is what has engendered her creation of a powerful composite form of theatre that has the complexity of a Hieronymus Bosch painting and the dream-like imagination of the surrealists. It is precisely when she juxtaposes extracts from opera and choral work — spliced into the score by Johanna Bramli and Ed Chivers — that the imagery is transformed from the evolutionary to the surreal. Pinato’s memorable duet with Pavarotti’s voice, and the funeral ceremony for Barbosa officiated by Bishop Brekke in his flowing purple robe (not to mention the subsequent ascension) to the Lachrymosa from Mozart’s Requiem attest to the power of choral music as a characteristic of our human evolution.
Resolution is The Place’s annual festival of new choreography and performance works by emerging artists. This review was originally commissioned by The Place as part of Resolution Review, where established dance writers are paired with a cohort of new writers interested in writing about dance to cover each night of the festival. The original review on this page (and its companion review) can be found here:
Resolution Review, Friday February 7
Time slows down in Jiwon Oh’s intimate dialogue with her grandmother, Jeonghee Jang, showing the ‘transmission of memory…revealing what is passed on, forgotten, and transformed’ The focus is very much internal, shared between the two of them, as if Jiwon Oh had asked her grandmother to show her the games she used to play so that she could emulate them in her own body. Calling the work Jeonghee in homage to her grandmother, Jiwon Oh has created a timeless work whose movement and spirit are based on a game with a long piece of rope — as we arrive the two are splicing the rope as if they have been at work for much of the evening. The rule is to dance in the spaces made by the pattern of the rope on the ground, never on the rope itself. Jeonghee Jang plays this game with perfect rhythmic recall while Jiwon Oh extrapolates the movements in youthful exuberance. In watching her we see the youthful grandmother before our eyes. Utterly captivating.
Tekoha, by Vivian Guyrá, is like a danced manifesto, moulded by the social and political message that gives it birth. Guyrá ‘is a Latin American indigenous choreographer who utilises movement to raise awareness about ethnic and environmental issues.’ Tekoha focuses on the identity and cultural heritage of the quilombolas — descendants of African slaves brought to Brazil — through a dance in which accents are heavily grounded, relating land to culture, the physical to the spiritual. It has elements of ritual dance and contemporary technique but the former always governs the latter. Synchronous group movement alternates with intensely sinewy articulated solos. Tekoha is mysterious and deeply emotional.
In Blank Dress, Amy Mauvan is at first so cocooned within her swathes of tulle that the image of an ostrich without its neck comes to mind. The image has nothing to do with Mauvan’s own idea of inhabiting a wedding dress that interrogates its wearer, but Blank Dress has that quality of never quite stating its intention. Even the words of the opening recorded text are hard to grasp, leaving the development of the work wandering aimlessly. With the dramatic unfolding of Mauvan’s almost bare torso from the tulle, the dress finally finds its place but the wearer has no answers to its questioning.
Aisha Naamani, No Idea What I’m Doing Annie Kelleher, Where We Are Now Gabrielle & Luke, Not Even A Pin Drop
Resolution is The Place’s annual festival of new choreography and performance works by emerging artists. This review was originally commissioned by The Place as part of Resolution Review, where established dance writers are paired with a cohort of new writers interested in writing about dance to cover each night of the festival. The original review on this page (and its companion review) can be found here:
Resolution Review January 22, 2025
The pleasure of watching dance is to be able to focus on the body’s expressive qualities, and choreography frames those qualities in a theatrical setting. The consistency of a work is when the dance qualities match the choreographic frame. On this ninth evening of Resolution2025 there is one work, Aisha Naamani’s No Idea What I’m Doing, where the consistency is palpable between Naamani’s dancing presence and the way she presents it.
The title suggests Naamani doesn’t take herself too seriously, but her performance leaves us in no doubt that she is in full command of her art form. She develops her idea of ‘an ode to the dawning realities of adulthood’ with an extensive arsenal of theatrical expression that keeps us wholly engaged in every detail.
The first work of the evening, Where We Are Now, choreographed by Annie Kelleher in collaboration with Jonathan Aubrey-Bentley, is framed in some kind of disaster scenario related to the climate emergency. When we first see them, Kelleher and Aubrey-Bentley are slowly shuffling towards us, leaning heavily on each other, mouths dry and eyes half closed like shell-shocked victims. Their gestures are not quite convincing, but when Kelleher breaks away to strut her gratuitous contemporary technique, the flight from disaster is unmasked and left in tatters. There is an episode of removing the tatters of their clothing in an epic struggle and a final exchange of epigrammatic barbs that sends up any seriousness. If the beginning was developed thoroughly and spliced to the surreal ending, Where We Are Now might be clearer.
Not Even a Pin Drop by Gabrielle de Souza and Luke Cartwright is ‘a narrative work based on Gabrielle’s experience of sudden deafness in one ear’, but without this program note the frame disappears. Tanisha Addicott as de Souza’s alter ego has gestures that suggest sudden deafness but the translation of her emotional states — ‘fear, hope, isolation, gratitude and disorientation’ — blends seamlessly with what appears to be a suite of neo-classical dances. Fortunately the five dancers — Addicott, Rosanna Lindsey, Maggie Kelly, Elizabeth Jeanna Ortega and Ellen Wilkinson — are a pleasure to watch, especially Rosanna Lindsey. Not Even a Pin Drop comes unframed.
